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In 2006 I took a summer Photoshop class at a community college. I had a student license for Photoshop CS, Patsy Ramsey had just died, and since we hadn't worked with Photoshop filters in class, I decided to play around with the cheek and back marks at home.

The cheek mark became my avatar. I could generate it with just a few clicks. The back marks gave me less joy--or so I thought. I zoomed in on a small portion of the upper figure and worked with that. I applied a Gaussian blur and an edge-finding function. I did this and that. Because zoomed in the image didn't look like much I didn't even intend to save my work, but I inadvertently did. When I opened the file again the next day and zoomed out, I had the rather ghostly image that I'm including here.

Our version of Photoshop CS did not provide a history which survived the closing of the file so I didn't know exactly what I had done and in what sequence. I knew I had confined myself to blurs, an edge-finding function and maybe some sharpening functions. I thought the results were interesting enough to contact BPD, Beckner, I think, who referred me to the DA, who had an investigator contact me. I talked to (or emailed with) a guy I recognized from TV. At the end I assumed that someone with expertise would do an enhancement of at least the back marks. So I was surprised when I read about Kolar's train track theory years later. (If memory serves, in his book Kolar described the marks as "circular and somewhat rectangular." I thought that was interesting because my enhancement more or less agrees, though I didn't see that in the crime scene photo.)

I was looking through tv guide Dec. 21-27, 1996, for something else (which turned out not to be there) when I noticed a show called Victory! With Billy Joe and Sharon Daugherty. (The listing includes the "!.") It's a religious program which showed several times that week.

DrollForeignFaction on websleuths posted in 2017 that Andrew Hodges said that Patsy watched that program. (I don't see that he attributes the remark to Judith Phillips, though.) It does seem like a show like that would be up Patsy's alley.

As I mentioned previously, a psalm very closely related to Psalm 35, is one of special significance to Patsy--Psalm 57. In DOI, Patsy says that before her cancer treatment she picked up the hotel room's Gideon Bible, opened it and pointed to a verse at random, a verse from Psalm 57, "In the shadow of your wings, I will make my refuge, / Until these calamities have passed by." She felt that this was a message from God.

Psalm 57 in the Ramsey Bible is laid out like Psalm 35, i.e., the cross references are in the middle of the page. That special verse from Psalm 57 (not shown) is on the same page and close to a cross reference to Psalm 35:17. That verse, 35:17, is on the page that the Bible was found open to.

I think Patsy may have used the same magic ritual she used to get guidance from God before her first cancer treatment: She opened her Bible to Psalm 57 and jabbed her finger into the page; landed on "Ps 35:17" and that's where she went. There really aren't any good initialisms on that page--LOIL doesn't sound much like a foreign faction. Whatever the reason, she used the first letters of the first lines of Psalm 35 for her foreign faction.

I'm including a photo of Psalm 57 in the 1985 NIV Study Bible, the Bible (and edition, I think) that was open on the desk in the study adjoining the bedroom. Visible is Patsy's magical verse and nearby is the cross-reference to Ps 35:17. It's a cross-reference to a similar line in Psalm 35 describing enemies as lions. Visible also is the verse about the pit digging, net spreading and pratfalling of enemies into the pits they've just dug. While there's no cross-reference in 57 to that same imagery in Psalm 35, it does exist there.

Many have noted that John used phrases from the ransom note in other contexts. In his '98 interview he used "100 percent" five times, "95 percent" twice, "80 percent," "99.9 percent," "98 percent," "70 percent," and "10 percent." These are not exactly what you find in the ransom note, but it's a lot more "percenting" than most people engage in. In part 2 of an A&E documentary, at 4:35 in, John said "to withhold her body for proper burial was barbaric." In an October 2000 interview he said, "The justice system is a government organization, and hence should be looked at with some degree of skepticism." It's not surprising that many people who think the Ramseys were responsible think that both were involved in writing the note.

I don't think both of them were. If they had both been involved in the murder they would have greeted the police in their pajamas, clutching teddy bears. That would have been part of the staging. If John took a shower and put on clothes different from the previous evening's, wouldn't Patsy have done the same? She felt the need to explain her lack of showering in DOI. She said that she got up intending to take a shower and then remembered that her shower was "still broken." The floor plan of the house shows three bathrooms on the second floor; wouldn't one of them have a shower? She spent 20-30 minutes putting on her makeup (she tells us) so she had enough time to spend an extra minute to go down one flight of stairs.

The fact that neither of them looked like they'd just gotten out of bed, belying their alibi, actually argues for an intruder. Except that Patsy wrote the note, a rather long one.

If both John and Patsy were involved, they would have presented themselves to the police in a way that corroborated their alibi. But evidence shows that Patsy wrote the note so she was the one who was involved.

Something big was going on in '95 and '96. In September 1995 The New York Times and The Washington Post both published a 35,000 word "manifesto," Industrial Society and its Future, authored by domestic terrorist "group" FC. The publication caused an uproar. This event wouldn't have gone unnoticed by journalism major Patsy. Then in April 1996, FC a.k.a. the Unabomber was arrested because his brother David recognized "cool-headed logicians" in the manifesto as being an expression used by his brother Ted. ("Cool-headed logicians" occurred about 1400 words in.) NYT published more than three dozen articles about the Unabomber and his capture--in April alone. A TV movie, Unabomber: The True Story, aired in September 1996. In it David Kaczynski recognizes the manifesto phrase "you can't eat your cake and have it" as a phrase his brother used, having picked it up from their mother who used it all the time. It might not have happened like that, but if you watched the TV movie, you think it did.

So Ted Kaczynski's downfall was publishing a long essay which exhibited his pet phrases and literary idiosyncrasies for all to see and someone who knew him well recognized them. Patsy would have known this, but still she wrote a long note packed full of what must be family phrases and insider knowledge. What was the idea? The more she wrote, the more she exposed herself to the fate that befell Ted Kaczynski; someone's going to notice pet expressions and phrases.

If the idea of a long note was to frame the housekeeper, what happens when the housekeeper turns out to have an alibi? Would the housekeeper know about the Atlanta Fat Cats or John's fetish for things southern. It seems doubtful so why throw all that stuff in? When the housekeeper turns out to have an alibi, the inside information will point back at someone named Ramsey.

I'm led to believe that Patsy's intent was to fill the ransom note with phrases which would be recognizable as John's. Would that be feasible? I tried to think of signature expressions my own family uses and I can't think of many, though I know we have a lot of them. I can, however, think of many expressions which were used habitually by an uncle I detested growing up. His pontificating was monumentally annoying. Maybe that's the key.